Calradia

Calradia is the setting of the first two Mount&Blade games. There are five factions (six in Warband), each with a ruler, a claimant, twenty vassals and a collection of fiefs that make up each faction's region.

The land of Calradia is neither static nor affected only by the player's actions. Each faction is free to wage war, form alliances, or sign peace treaties with other factions.

Law and order are the exception, rather than the rule, in Calradia. Deserters and brigands of all sorts harass trade routes and attack villagers whilst evading the attacks of manhunters seeking the bounties on their heads. Farmers traveling to market to sell their harvest and caravans traveling from town to town trading goods must fend off looters and thieves seeking to reap what they did not sow. Lords, too, are threatened by the chaos; fiefs regularly change hands during wartime. Even the kings of each faction are not safe. Claimants to the throne travel across the land, seeking brave and adventurous allies to back their claims and launch civil wars.

Calradia roughly means "ruled by the council" in old Slavic languages.

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The land of Calradia resembles a continental terrain bordered by a mountain chain to the south (A desert in Warband) and a snow plain to the east. It holds eight rivers, two that end in deltas, three dozen forests of varying sizes, and one lake. The earth is predominantly green except in the steppes, where it appears to be drier, and in the snow field, where it is covered with snow (In Warband, there is also lands covered in sand to the south).

Due to the fact that a new faction was added (Sarranid Sultanate) and there was no place to squeeze in the kingdom, the Warband map is completely redesigned from the vanilla map, while still bearing similar climatic zones such as steppes and tundra.

The new map turns Calradia more into a rounded peninsula, akin in a few ways to Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings. Converting the map from a square to a more ball-shaped landmass has the advantage of making fewer parts of the map isolated and awkwardly detached, as areas like around Aldelen, Tulbuk, and Tebandra were in the original map.

The true history of Calradia is quite vague. The only characters whose lives are described in any detail are monarchs, claimants, and heroes. However, it is implied that the Factions have been at war for a very long time, and that the player is the only person who has any chance of bringing about peace.

An ancient Calrad (or sometimes Calradic) Empire is frequently mentioned by the various heroes as predating all of the kingdoms. Matheld speaks of how the first Nords to arrive in Calradia were hired to man the Empire's galleys, for instance. Lezalit says that the Empire utilized all of the fighting styles represented in its empire, but that eventually "the tribes" destroyed the Empire.

The fourth game in the series, and third canonical, Bannerlord, will feature the Calradic Empire shortly before its fall.

Other companions speak of how Praven was the largest city under the Empire, and of the Imperial heritage that suffuses the region around Suno. Overall, very little of its actual history is ever revealed, but it is obvious that the Calrad Empire fell apart and was split into 5 (6, in Warband) kingdoms. It is apparent that there are other nations in the Mount&Blade world. Examples include the County of Geroia, from which Lezalit claims his noble lineage as the Count's second son, and Marnid reveals as his place of origin; and Balion, a realm beyond Calradia's western coast, far over the sea described in the profile of Konrad, a Custom Battle character. The player character is also described as a foreigner, and many heroes speak of leaving their homelands to seek their destiny in Calradia.